Sukar which means sugar in Arabic is an e-commrece site that is different than any other as it is a private shopping club, for selected group of people, aiming to reach a very selective niche market never approached online in the Arab world, with interesting offers for everyone in the household; females, males and kids.

Sukar works by running new discounted campaigns for the best brands every week with new sales events and new products lines, this week the site features very well known brands such DIESEL and D&G with discount rates sometimes up to 70%.

The site has a very appealing user interface, as the user experience offers users a feel of elegance and style touched by little yellow to indicate uniqueness, both colours match the “target sophisticated segment”!! The site owners say that the models that are used to display different out fits are hired by Sukar exclusively offering users to text different sizes visually.

In the backend side, Sukar does its own fulfillment and accept payment via Cash on delivery, Jabbar’s CASHU and all major credit cards. and offers live customer support via chat or phone.

Sukar is founded by Saygin Yalcin who comes originaly from germany but he is with Turkish origins, and is also cofounded by Ahmed Alkhatib acting as CTO where he brings his experience he had accumulated in Silicon Valley with leading firms including MySpace.com, Zazzle.com, Disney.com, Ebay.com and many other high-profiles, high-traffic web presence ecommerce platforms.

(We got 5 invites, if you want an invite to sukar leave a comment with a valid email address below.)

While I understand that it focuses on high end goods, it does not mean that they’ve found an untapped niche. Deals for high end consumer goods could be found everywhere on the net.

The invitation only model is a nice approach to create a buzz and interest in your service, people seem to fall for it quite often (see Gmail, Facebook, etc…). Could be attributed to people wanting to feel part of something exclusive or that people want what they can’t have (or be part of in this case) ala “forbidden fruit syndrome”.

Jabbar group just decided to drive business to their CashU unit that hasn’t been quite as successful as they had hoped by teaming up with a site that caters to a crowd that might be encouraged to use CashU to pay for high end goods at a cheaper price.

Simple, smart business sense. Kudos to them. But let’s not try to make it into something more than that, because it’s not.

I agree with Makram that this segment has been neglected in the MENA region recently. I am an active member to 2 of UK based exclusive shopping clubs since 2008 such as Ruelala.com and http://www.SecretSales.com and I don’t hide you that my company has thought seriously to tap into this niche with a penetration strategy targeting UAE as the first expansion block.

By the way, another strong Arabian competitor for Sukar.com is already launched: Fashionation.me and it is based in Dubai and shipping for the whole region. I advise both of them to excellence via great customer service, true sales, exclusive items, accurate shipping and of course I suggest them to cooperate with Aramex to enable a smooth shipping and logistics procedures.